Steve Jobs recalls reading a Scientific American article about the efficiency of locomotion across species. He highlights that while humans ranked lower in efficiency, a human riding a bicycle surpassed even the top-ranked condor. This realization impressed upon him that humans are exceptional tool builders. He equates computers to 'bicycles of the mind,' amplifying human abilities significantly. Jobs believes we are at the beginning of this technological journey, with enormous changes already seen and more to come in the next century.
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00:00I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been in Scientific American,
00:04where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth.
00:09How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B?
00:12The Condor 1 came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else,
00:16and humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.
00:21But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle.
00:26Human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list.
00:29It made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders,
00:33and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.
00:40So for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind,
00:43something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
00:47I think we're just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages,
00:51and we've come only a very short distance, and it's still in its formation,
00:55but already we've seen enormous changes. I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years.